As another CD of tunes has been recorded, I tend to look back at all the various stuff I’ve put down over the last decade I’ve been recording and reflecting on the nature of all of this. I often ask myself why I bother and why should I continue to bother?
Music is my hobby. I am not a professional musician because if I was, I would starve to death. So there’s no impetus to continue recording as there are no mouths to feed, no butlers to pay, and no mistresses to keep in Ferraris. I do it purely for my own entertainment. But why?
Well back at the beginning, the learning of an instrument was part of a phase all my peers were into. I guess I was drawn to the arty crowd at school, but due to coming from a single-parent family and not having two brass farthings to rub together, the chances of me getting a guitar for Christmas or my birthday was slim. In those days, guitars were expensive things of beauty and you just didn’t see the cheap starter instruments that you get today. To spend £130 on a guitar back in the mid-80s would be the equivalent of spending five times that today, so it was never going to happen.
By the time I did finally convince my grandmother to “loan” me the money for a bass guitar, everyone else had either moved on or dropped out of college. So I was on my own with my bass. This is a story I’ve told before, so sorry if I am repeating myself. But I was determined to play the instrument and get something from it as I had waited five of my teenage years to get one.
So I played. Then when I got my first grant cheque, I bought a tape recorder. Then I recorded. The important thing about recording is it let me do two things. Firstly, it let me hear just how frigging bad I was (though at the time youthful exhuberence tells you otherwise) and it put in me in a “live” situation, as I would often set the drum machine going and jam onto the tape. This enabled me to forget the fear of the red recording light and to concentrate on hiding my lack of musical ability.
I am not a natural musician. I am not someone who can pick up an instrument and play by ear. I have never had any interest in playing other people’s songs or licks, and have only ever been interested in creating what I consider “new” things. Why?
Well before the music was the writing. From the age of about ten years old, I was convinced that I was a writer and that I should have a career in writing. I loved telling stories and stringing lies together in order to entertain and involve the reader. Writing for me is a little bit like breathing or any other natural bodily function. I can just do it. It sounds arrogant, but I’ve learnt that with any creative act comes a certain degree of conceit. Call it confidence, arrogance, blind faith, or whatever, but if you don’t have it, you won’t create. Any wavering feeling of self-realisation or doubt will kill a creative project. So you have to have the power to believe.
So I grew bored with the writing. I could write a novel in six weeks if I wanted to. But who would read it? If I was any good an agent would take me on and get me a publishing deal, but that would take effort and I’m not very good at stuffing manuscripts into envelopes. I tried when I was younger, but got frustrated at waiting and waiting and waiting for the rejection letters to pile up. Then I grew to know the nature of the publishing industry and the old adage: “It’s not what you know, but who you know” never seemed more a truism. Some might say: “Oh, you are cynical because of your lack of talent”. I say: “This is probably half the story”.
The need to create or be creative is a strong one. The popularisation of the Internet, and more importantly, the development of the MP3 encoding format fell at exactly the same time the technology was made available to allow home PCs to record and mix multi-channel audio. All these factors converged at roughly the same point and I, being one for technology, bought into the idea of the home computer as a multi-track audio recorder. So after about four years of playing very little, I engaged with my instruments again.
For me, the process of making music is a lot harder than writing a novel, and so I decided to pursue a musical hobby rather than continually writing material no-one was ever going to read. At least with music, I could self-publish. And the internet has allowed me to do this. And if it was good, people would like it. And if it was bad…well, people soon let you know if something is bad.
I had recorded a couple of tapes in the early 90s, about four-and-a-half hours of dubious material. Most of it was rank, but a couple of tracks signposted what pathway I would take. While I enjoy writing lyrics and songs, I am not a vocalist and prefer “tunes”. So the impetus would be to explore the guitar and try and make songs that I could whistle.
So over the last ten years I have recorded twenty-five albums of material: from “Fade In – Fade Out” in 1998 to this year’s “EchoNET”. And out of that, I have made enough money to buy a single electric guitar in the medium budget range. So why do it?
I don’t know. Am I showing off? Am I setting myself challenges? Am I hoping that something will come out of all of this? I don’t know. What I do know is this is a thankless business…like all work, really. True, I get the odd positive comment on YouTube and the rare email once a year, but feedback is limited and it is getting harder to sell product, so that is why I give it away.
Take for example, the surround sound DVDs I released last month. I did that project purely to take my mind off dealing with insurance companies and the worry generated by my personal situation. But at the end I had three DVDs that I couldn’t sell – so give them away – I had the bandwidth there, so let’s see who wants them. Since their release last month, I’ve shifted over 400Gb of data. In real terms, that equates to over 400 individual DVDs – though the actual figure is hard to quantify. 400 DVDs? That’s without all the files that are shared on P2P networks. Well call it 500, shall we? In that time, I’ve not had one email to thank me or to ask how I did it or to tell me what a big fat fucking idiot I am. There’s just a void. An empty space between me pressing the mousebutton that FTP’d the files onto the website and the mouse click of the downloader as they burn the ISO files to DVD, ready for playback on their 5.1 surround sound system.
I’m feeling frail, I guess. A little worn. Like the dregs of the butter dish, yellowed and on the turn, I am spread thinly across the bread of life, with such effort that the knife has worked on the fundament of the dough and created holes and broken the surface tension of the whitened slice. The past seven months have been an ordeal and I don’t know how I am sitting here typing this…or even why I am publishing it.
I think this is the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new start. Although I am feeling isolated and emotional (I burst into tears while having a piss yesterday for no apparent reason), I do sense that everything is getting better. The Missus sees it in more simpler terms. When I ask her why should I bother recording she says to me:
“It’s what you do.”
So maybe I am a musican then? I don’t know. I just think I am messing about to be honest. The way I feel in my limited capacity as a musician
Category: Diary
Before…
After…
Well I finally managed to put the pieces together to finish another CD of material and I bring you EchoNET. I’ve designed the new artwork and just need to fabricate the new CDs for processing and worldwide electronic distribution. The thing about the new CD is that it will be packaged with a free DVD that contains the 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound mix of the album, so you can immerse yourself in the audio experience. The album is just over 45 minutes long and features 14 tracks, most of which have been previewed on this site in one form or another.
I’ll post proper links when it is all complete and ready for purchase.
So you are probably walking around looking like Michael Jackson on a shopping spree in Dubai, resplendent with face mask and a prescription of TamiFlu, wondering if which of your family members are going to buy the farm during the great Swine Flu Pandemic of 2009? Well Swine Flu isn’t a new phenomenon, here’s an information film from 1976 which follows a similar slant to what we are getting today.
Does anyone remember the great Swine Flu pandemic of ’76? No, neither can I. All I remember was the blazing hot summer and having my right arm in plaster up to the shoulder. Summer 2009 is going the same way…but no arm in plaster, right?
I awoke from a dream in which none of the local newspapers had been delivered…
When we got to the shop, I opened the drop bin to find that the local papers had not been delivered.
Dreaming the future sucks all the surprise out of the day.
If you are a regular reader of this blog you have probably realised that I have a bit of a weak spot for music technology. If you are like me and have limited musical talent and ability, I cannot emphasise enough how important it is for you to scout around and find new ways of making your playing appear more interesting. This can be done by a multitude of ways; some practise, some have lessons, but I just hide behind a vast array of electronics in a pathethic attempt to add colour to my guitar playing.
Where is this going? Well, I am always on the look-out for new gizmos to either bring a new sonic array to my arsenal of sounds or to inspire new tunes. Last year, it was the Boss SL-20 that really floated my boat. The idea behind that pedal was to bring the “slicer” effect to the guitar, an effect that has existed for a while in synthesisers and been used predominantly in the dance music genre. It takes the sound source and cuts it into pieces and broadcasts it rhythmically, slicing it up and broadcasting a pulsing cut-up sound. It’s hard to explain further than that really. Anyway, the SL-20 was interesting to me because it also brought a level of harmonic delay to the proceedings.
Harmonic delay is something that has interested me for a while. The concept is that you strike a note and the equipment is programmed to play the harmonic variations of that note. So you can instantly create a backing track for a song with just a handful of notes. This is what attracted me to the SL-20 and then the Digitech Timebender which was advertised earlier in the year at the 2009 Winter NAMM.
I’ve been waiting a couple of months for the units to hit the UK and was lucky to spot them arrived at Absolute Music Solutions last weekend, so I put my order in. Absolute Music Solutions are a preferred music sales team of mine, so I wholeheartedly recommend them. When they have the gear in stock, they have it in stock (unlike many other musical instrument webstores) and their delivery is lightning fast. Prices are good too!
Anyway, the Timebender is a standard twin pedal configuration that has been championed by Boss et al. The delay side of the pedal is impecable and if you are looking for the ultimate delay pedal, it certainly gives the Boss DD-20 a run for its money. Something I noticed about the DD-20 is that it does “colour” your sound and you seem to lose some dynamic range. You don’t have this with the Timebender and everything sounds sparky and clean.
There are ten delay varieties and a 20 second looper. The range of delays are great, but to my cloth-ears, I can’t always hear a difference, but you get 5 seconds max of stereo delay. The interesting part of the pedal is how you present the delay in the mix. You can have it bouncing all over the shop with a panner effect, or you can select one of the 9 auto-rhythms.
Where the pedal comes into its own is with the “Strum” function. This allows you to hold down the right pedal and pick a dampened note in the rhythm you want your delay to repeat. It is frightningly accurate and you can create some great varieties of delay repeat. In fact, if you think about it, I guess it is only limited by your imagination.
This Strum feature can be combined with the harmonic delay feature, which gives you 100 intelligent harmony settings to pay with. Using the MusIQ technology, you press down the right pedal again and play the fundamental note (or chord) to figure out what key you are playing in and the harmonics are generated from that. It is a great feature, but it is a bit picky. During my tests, it would throw out many wobbly notes and I am thinking that it isn’t particularly fond of the output from the Roland VG-99. Funnily enough, the Timebender harmonic function tracked more accurately with my bass and VB-99 setup. I have a feeling that the pedal likes really clean, direct output from the guitar for it to operate with optimum accuracy. I will try this later and report back here.
If you don’t have a “do-it-all” delay pedal and are looking to buy into that market, then the Timebender is a must-have. However, it is limited by its five second delay and the mono 20 second looper. The Boss DD-20 has a 20-second max delay and stereo looper and its really still king of the castle when it comes to delay. But if you are intrigued by the idea of harmonic delay and can find a use for it in your recording setup, then gives this pedal a spin.
The following two tracks are recorded with just a guitar and bass and the Timebender harmonic delay function.
The next track is called “March of the Numpties” and ended up sounding like something off Robert Fripp’s “League of Crafty Guitarists” albums. It is a single nylon guitar with the harmonic delay panned left and right. I quite like it because it sounds ridiculous!
A new toy is always a cause for inspiration. When I heard that Digitech were launching a delay pedal that featured the concept of harmonic delay, my attention was caught. The Timebender pedal is a great digital delay pedal. Not quite as good as the Boss DD-20 in terms of delay length, but it does have this harmonic delay feature, which creates harmonic variations of the notes you play. It can create a shimmering harmonic fountation of sound, though I have been using it as bedding for a track.
For example, the following song has me putting my six-string bass through the Timebender and panning the harmonic delay left and right so that it has a more guitar-like accompaniament. My energy levels are a little low at the moment and so recording completely drains me now. This saddens me greatly as I do feel the creative urge biting and not being able to express it.
But yes, the bass/Timebender provides the harmonic backing of this track and we have some nylon six-string guitar doing the melody. This is a minor piece in-so-much as I spent about 90 minutes recording and producing it. The electric guitar solo in the middle and end of the track is another of my attempts to produce a “non-solo” in so much as it is more a wash of sound embodying “feel” rather than providing any melodic narrative.
To put it frankly, I recorded it to cheer me up. That’s why it is called “Sunny Jim”.
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Direct download: CLICK HERE